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Pangea Day: Uniting the World with Film

May 10, 2008

by
findingDulcinea Staff

The first Pangea Day is Saturday, May 10. The global event will be using film to unite audiences with speakers, music and other performances that showcase the cultural variety and inquisitive minds on our planet.

Pangea Day gathers the films of 24 finalists from a pool of 2,500 applicants from more than a hundred countries. These films express the essence of the filmmakers’ cultures, sharing art, music and ideas with an enormous international audience. You can use Pangea Day’s Web site to locate a nearby screening in one of seven languages. If none of the locations are convenient, you can watch a broadcast on television or the Internet. Visit the “About” section of the Pangea Day site to learn more.

The Egyptian-American filmmaker Jehane Noujaim founded Pangea Day with the help of the TED Prize, awarded to individuals at the TED Conference, an annual event for inspiring “thinkers and doers.” TED stands for “Technology, Entertainment, Design,” and the TED Prize is given to conference participants whose “wish to change the world” inspires the panel of judges. Noujaim’s wish was to “harness the power of film to enhance empathy, compassion, and peace.” Learn about Noujaim and other TED Prize winners, including President Clinton and author Dave Eggers, at the TED Prize site.

Before Pangea Day, Noujaim, a Harvard graduate with several director and cinematographer roles under her belt, wrote and directed “Control Room” (2004), one of the most celebrated documentaries on news media. “Control Room” covers the evolution and practices of the Arab newspaper Al Jazeera, its coverage of the Iraq invasion in 2003, its clashes with U.S. Central Command, and the lives of the newspaper’s staff and fellow journalists. Trailers and more information about the film are available at the Noujaim Films site.

Noujaim’s goal with Pangea Day is to give people who clearly want to change the world to have an opportunity to do so. Noujaim remarked that the audience at “Control Room” screenings asked her what they could do to help countries in trouble. She conceived Pangea Day for such people, backed by research showing how powerfully film, television, and the Web can influence people; in particular, young people, the newest agents of change in the world. The site’s FAQ page links to some of this research.

In a 2006 talk from the TED Conference, available via video on the TED Conference Web site, Noujaim talks about her Pangea Day wish. She admits that her wish is the standard “world peace,” but that it requires a unique means of “traveling” without actually traveling, by “telling stories visually” using photography and film. She was brought up by a Lebanese-Syrian-Egyptian father and an American mother who stressed community service when Noujaim was a child. Their influence can be seen in Noujaim’s first project, photographs of a garbage-collecting village in Cairo that she took when she was 16. The photographs outraged many people, and all but the three of them were removed from their exhibit at the U.N. Conference on Population and Development. The experience made Noujaim realize how powerful and provocative images could be.

One of the interesting features of Pangea Day’s site is the “Films” section, which right now has clips of people from one country singing another country’s national anthem: Australia singing Lebanon’s anthem, France singing the U.S.’s “The Star-Spangled Banner” and so on. In the lead up to Pangea Day, more promotional clips will be available on the site.